The Labour government may be doomed, but the absurdist regime that it inflicts upon us – in an attempt to construct the perfectly ordered society – has life in it yet. Reading recent examples of its doctrinaire ways, I realise that we have a long way to go before we have delineated the boundary between the public and private, but little green shoots of liberty are showing.

While the government has been warned that it faces opposition in the Lords over Jacqui Smith's plans to hold a million innocent people's DNA for up to 12 years, which is at last a sign that legislators are taking the database seriously, it has also been revealed that police are carrying out a strategy of using the database as a "crime prevention measure."

A freedom of information request made by a Lib Dem candidate, Jo Shaw, found that in the north London borough of Camden, police are taking DNA samples from children under ten. A total of 386 under-18s who have committed no crime have had their DNA taken. An anonymous policeman said, "We are often told that we have just one chance to get that DNA sample and if we miss it then that might mean a rape or a murder goes unsolved in the future." He added: "Have we got targets for young people who have not been arrested yet? The answer is yes. But we are not just waiting outside schools to pick them up, we are acting on intelligence." Clearly, the police are building a database of individuals they believe will become criminals in the future, which is chilling, utterly against the spirit of the law and all our conventions that say a person is innocent until proven guilty.

The government is pressing ahead with its policies on ID cards, collection of data from all communications and the ridiculous attempt to demand 53 pieces of personal information from everyone leaving and entering the country, yet there are signs of reason and resistance. In Sheffield, a hard-hitting motion was passed to say that the city should not follow Manchester by taking part in the regional pilot projects for the ID card scheme. Lib Dem leader Paul Scriven said, "Labour's plans to force the ID card on us is a waste of money and it won't stop crime or terrorism".

In Scotland, the chief constable of Lothian and Borders police, David Strang, questioned the spread of the Taser gun in relatively peaceful areas. He said it was important to assess the success of Tasers in England and Wales, where they have been highly controversial, before increasing their deployment in Scotland. In London the new head of the Metropolitan police, Sir Paul Stephenson, has announced a review of the unpopular Form 696, which is designed to gauge the risk at live music events, after MPs said the form went way beyond the provisions of the Licensing Act.

And finally, internet service providers, those benighted souls who have been lumbered with the government's megalomaniac ambition to seize the data from all our communications, have given the home secretary's proposal a distinctly frosty reception. "The industry doesn't think the government understands the likely costs associated with this activity and the continually moving goalpost that is the internet," said one of those who recently attended a Home Office presentation. "So the costs of maintaining this capability are likely to be large and ongoing for as long as the government wants to monitor people's activity." Which is why, no doubt, the Home Office ditched the plan to store this information itself.